Lo-Quality WoW

Don’t know why but it’s been a chore to play WoW lately. I just can’t seem to get motivated, on any of my alts. So it’s taken me a couple of weeks to chug my warrior over to 80.
Puttering on to 79 was mostly aimless wandering, primarily in Zul’Drak. But once I hit that 79, I figured I should move over to Storm Peaks at least. So running through the quest chains in K3, I eventually started working on those for the Frostborn and the Sons of Hodir. I had forgotten that the Sons of Hodir were hostile for you at the start. Took awhile to work my way through the chain to get the first daily with them. The Sons of Hodir dailies tend to be my main source of daily income for my hunter, and it’ll probably eventually be the same for my warrior. That and I really like their shoulder inscriptions.

In between doing this, my guild decided to do a run through regular Violet Hold. The night they did it, I apparently kept falling asleep at my computer since they said they were trying to get a hold of me for several minutes. Guess I’ve just been sleep deprived or something.

I found out later that they had tried to 4-man it with two of our 80 hunters but with a lvl 73 Death Knight tanking. And apparently, Cyanigosa kicked their butts so they just putter around until I woke up. So I winged my way over there and rushed inside.

Again I discovered there’s a big gap between my tanking knowledge and my dps knowledge of an instance. I also discovered that my tanking skills are more than a little rusty. Now the main trick in VH is to have a “reset” point that everyone gathers before tackling the next portal. Because the portals can spawn either a portal guardian or a blue dragonflight patrol, you need to be ready for either.

While not especially difficult, each takes a slightly different tactic. The portal guardian is like those found in Black Morass, with one main boss while other adds with periodically pop up and run towards the door. Now for VH as opposed to BM, usually the tank will pick up the adds on their way out instead of leaving them for one of the dps to wipe out. I had a slight problem timing my few aoe attacks to pick up those adds, although I locked down on it after a while. I also had to tank with the portal off my shoulder rather than at my back. When I had my back to it, I had a harder time seeing and picking up the adds.

For the patrol, it means three to four members of the dragonflight pop out and charge towards the door. This is simple for most of it except for those at one portal where the patrol seems to split up and come down two different stairs. I don’t quite remember seeing that before, so when it happened the first time I had trouble picking them up. It also seemed like no matter what I did, at least one would latch on to our healer during all this and I had to run around a bit more than I like doing such a battle.

As for the random bosses, we ended up with Ichoron and Lavanthor. Ichoron was hard in that I forgot he does a knockback when he “explodes” which launched me into the pool of water he emerged from. Which scared the heck out of our healer when I suddenly went out of line of sight of her. It also caused trouble since it’s a little slower to swim than it is to run and I was essentially out of the picture until I got back on dry land. Fortunately, one of our hunters who had been to VH before ran and activated the toggle switch and wiped the little buggers out before they could do much damage and the rest of the fight went much smoother. Lavanthor is much easier in comparison. It’s mainly facing him away from everyone and we healed through the rest of it.

Cyanigosa was relatively simple as well. I knew to taunt almost immediately after her Arcane Grip spell and to keep her facing away from the group. Our dps was a little low so it took a little longer than I’m used to but we did it, netting the non-80’s the The Violet Hold achievement.

That was practically the only excitement for my warrior in her 79’s until I had the 2000 Quests Completed pop up suddenly. By comparison, my Hunter’s statistics claims that he’s completed 4265 quests.

I got that about 3/4 of the way through 79 and besides waking me up, it made me realize that I needed to move over to Icecrown for a bit. Primarily because there is quite a bit of phased areas here and I wanted to set myself up to be able to work on Ebon Blade reputation when I got the chance. And of course, during the pursuit of this, I hit my 80 and gained the redundant Level 80 achievement notification. Okay, maybe not redundant since it actually announced to my guild that I now had my second lvl 80. Or would have if anyone had been on at the time.

So for now, my warrior goes on the shelf except for the occasional daily or tanking duty while I run up my rogue or mage. I also need to figure out how I’m going to work her talents out. Sort of similar to my lower level alts, I got to a certain point in my talent trees and then sort of forgot to add more as I progressed, so I have a couple of points unallocated. Not really in a rush since from what I’m seeing from 3.1 indicated that everyone is going to get a talent wipe. Okay, maybe not everyone since I haven’t been reading all the changes but there’s a good chance that I’ll end up having to redo my talent builds regardless. Maybe by then I’ll have some sort of plan. Nah.